he went to law school and became an advocate for tenants rights in boston where he began to scratch poems on legal pads while waiting in court houses for cases to be called. you can't read any of his 16 books of poems and essay, and most recently, the trouble ball, without understanding a man who is a struggling writer, whose past is a living, breathing news whispering over his shoulder as he scribbles the names of ancestors who once pulled the oars over troubled waters. it was in the wake of president barack obama's victory that brought him here, to the former slave frederick douglas skpchlt with it, a poem. >> rochester, new york, november 7, 2008. this is the long titude and latitude of the impossible. this is the epicenter of the unthinkable. this is the crossroads of the unimaginable, the tomb of frederick douglas three days after the election. this is a world spinning away from the gravity of centuries where the grave of a fugitive slave has become an altar. this is a tomb of a man born as chattel who taught himself to read in secret, scraping the letters in his name with chalk on w